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“Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.”
Here, Gabriel reflects on the fact that his wife’s first love died, possibly out of love for her. He feels pity for the man, and, by extension, reflects on all of the dead. He confronts the fact that he and the rest of the living are surrounded by the dead—as memories, as continuing influences. The living and the dead, barely separated, at times seem to pass into each other’s worlds.
“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
In these final few lines, Gabriel links the equalizing nature of death to the snow that is blanketing Ireland. He conflates these two phenomena because snow has no regard for who and what it covers just as death eventually comes for everyone regardless of status or background. This passage is also an example of a pathetic fallacy—that is, attributing human emotion and behavior to things found in nature that are not actually human.
